Guest post by Paul Homewood
In their attempts to disguise the fact that 2012 will likely turn out to be one of the colder years this century, NOAA have made the ludicrous, and frankly dishonest, claim that this year will be the “hottest La Niña” year on record.
But is it a La Niña year?
NOAA’s own Multivariate ENSO Index is shown below.
http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/psd/enso/mei/
And the monthly numbers:-
http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/psd/enso/mei/table.html
To November, the index averages +0.160, which would be classified as between neutral and weak El Niño. The monthly rankings below also confirm that the index for the year is above average, coming in at 36th out of 63. (The rankings run from 1950-2012). The July ranking of 57 shows that there were only 6 July’s that had a higher MEI.
http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/psd/enso/mei/rank.html
And did this ENSO transition from negative (La Niña) to positive (El Niño) have any effect on temperature during the year? You betcha!
Take a look at UAH, for instance.
http://vortex.nsstc.uah.edu/data/msu/t2lt/uahncdc.lt
UAH anomalies hit a low point of –0.13C in Jan/Feb, and then bounced up to 0.34C in October, before sinking back to 0.28C in November as the El Niño fizzled out.
For NOAA to pretend that 2012 was a La Nina year, and then use temperatures, heavily affected by El Niño conditions throughout the summer, to “prove” that it is the hottest La Nina year is not something real scientists do.
For a more realistic comparison, the last 12 month period, when ENSO was pretty neutral, was April 2001-March 2002, when the MEI averaged minus 0.003. The UAH temperature anomaly was 0.157C for that period, and compares with a current figure for the last 12 months of 0.150C. This, of course, suggests little underlying change in global temperature for the last 10 years.
But, it seems , NOAA are more interested in propaganda than the truth.
They say a picture is worth a thousand words. See the graph lines below for 2012 on 6 data sets and wti.
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/wti/from:2012/plot/gistemp/from:2012/plot/uah/from:2012/plot/rss/from:2012/plot/hadsst2gl/from:2012/plot/hadcrut4gl/from:2012/plot/hadcrut3gl/from:2012
Bob Tisdale:
Do we know the El Nino’s and La Nina periods for the interval 1890 through 1970?
Could these cycles – or changes in these cycles – explains the changes in temperature during that interval?
Paul Homewood says: “Are they making up their own definition?”
I don’t know the source. But I would expect similar nonsense next year, something to the effect of 2013 is the warmest ENSO-neutral year since blah, blah, blah. And if it’s not, maybe one of the hemispheres will be warmest. As I said, it’s just a game to keep the manmade global warming myth alive. Too bad the sea surface temperature and ocean heat content records contradict the hypothesis.
Enjoy your holidays.
I’m just glad, even though it was a chilly, and below average, 37ºF, at my house this morning, it was 84ºF warmer than it was in Fairbanks, AK.
RACookPE1978 says: Do we know the El Nino’s and La Nina periods for the interval 1890 through 1970?
There are 3 sea surface temperature reconstructions that have sufficient data in the eastern equatorial Pacific to determine El Nino and La Nina periods: ERSST.v3b, HADISST, and Kaplan SST:
http://bobtisdale.files.wordpress.com/2012/12/figure-7-1.png
Much of that data before the 1950s is reconstructed. And it gets worse before the opening of the Panama Canal in 1914. With that in mind, I created an ONI-like index of El Nino and La Nina events a couple of years ago, using HADISST-based NINO3.4 sea surface temperature anomalies, starting in 1900.
http://bobtisdale.wordpress.com/2010/11/30/long-term-oni-like-table-of-el-nino-and-la-nina-events/
RACookPE1978 says: “Could these cycles – or changes in these cycles – explains the changes in temperature during that interval?”
If we look at ENSO as an uncontrolled and variable source of heat released into the atmosphere and warm water redistributed within the oceans, then the answer is yes. Global temperatures warm during periods when El Nino events dominate and cool during periods when La Nina events are dominant:
http://bobtisdale.files.wordpress.com/2012/12/figure-7-6.png
There was a cross post here about that just yesterday:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/12/20/el-nino-southern-oscillation-myth-3-enso-has-no-trend-and-cannot-contribute-to-long-term-warming/
Enjoy your holidays.
Let’s check with NOAA’s own data. The URL I use is
http://nomad3.ncep.noaa.gov/cgi-bin/pdisp_sst.sh?ctlfile=oiv2.ctl&ptype=ts&var=ssta&level=1&op1=none&op2=none&day=03&month=jan&year=1990&fday=26&fmonth=dec&fyear=2012&lat0=-5&lat1=5&lon0=-170&lon1=-120&plotsize=800×600&title=&dir=
The reason it looks so ugly is because the lat/long of the NINO3.4 area is encoded in it, along with the start and end dates. The values are weekly. For the first 50 weeks of the year, the average is 0.087539838. The last 2 weeks of the year wouls have to average -2.19 or lower to bring the year into negative territory. Yes, NINO3.4 is *POSITIVE*!!! La Nina year? Taurine excrement!
Global temps follow the formula of 0.2 times Nino 3.4 lagged 3 months.
So, cool start to the year, warming after, November temps are still being impacted by the August El Niño temps. We are now on the way down since it looks like Nino 3.4 will be about -0.1C in December.
And this what the temperature trend has been through 2012.
Overall, it will be a -0.06C La Niña year. Hardly anything to call the warmest La Niña year ever since it is NOT.
But facts don’t get in the way of a good scary global warming story. We have only heard the same thing for about the 1,000th time so far.
Shouldn’t be mixing their ninos and ninas?
The S.I. Unit of ENSO is what…..?
How many apples in a barrel of grapes?
As Paul Homewood alludes to, ENSO is a user-defined index, not a meaningful physical quantity.
The financial people know that if the Dow-Jones Index doesn’t do what you said or want, then look at another index such as a small-cap index. Or look at NASDAQ instead. There’s plenty of choices. Talk about the price of cabbages.
In finance, economics and politics, if the audience actually believes numbers with user-defined arbitrary units actually mean something useful, then they actually, probably, possibly, might be useful.
But not in science.
This is a cold pattern through out the Planet IMHO:
http://weather.unisys.com/surface/sfc_daily.php?plot=ssa&inv=0&t=cur
at least dead neutral in the El Nino portion of the East Pacific..
to my untrained eye.. No real hot spots in the southern Ocean….
The hottest November record I have ever found for South East Queensland was in November 1968.
I sat a grade 10 Tech. Drawing exam in western Brisbane that year and it was over 105 F in the exam room.
The next hottest I have found occured in November 1980 but was about 38 – 39 C – not as high as 1968 but still pretty damn hot and well above the Spring average for Brisbane.
Funny how weather varies !
PS this November’s maximum is only the warmest since ~ 2002 – pales into insignificance really.
Oh – and that is for a different weather station (in an urban area ) which is situated well away from the older bayside location – yes the old station was in a cooler location near Moreton Bay not further inland like the new one.
That would be a nono.
Once again the exception proves the rule. Because this year is the coldest in a century, it proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that the earth is not warming. After all there is 3% Carbon Dioxide in the atmosphere than last year, so we should see a 3% increase in temperature. The linear relationship between Carbon Dioxide concentrations and temperature is just not established. There must be something else going on.
I wonder just how many crazy extremely fine grained statistics they will have to make up (and just when they will give up on this farce…).
The ocean doesn’t have a hot spot in it anywhere other than a shrinking dot near Iceland about to be frozen out of existence. Russia and China are having very cold and hard winters. The USA is in the middle of major winter storms and the snow is being delivered all over the place, with vigor. We even had snow down to Anatolia … and winter isn’t even up to speed yet.
I can see it now: “Hottest cold day in Death Valley”…
E.M.Smith says:
December 21, 2012 at 10:00 pm
I can see it now: “Hottest cold day in Death Valley”…
==========================================
Yes indeed, “Record low in the Florida keys…CAGW produces warmest record low EVR in the US.”
The whole problem is one fact: the truth doesn’t matter anymore (well for a lot of people anyway usually green in colour).
mtobis says:
“…is a La Nina year for this purpose.”
And that purpose is what? Subterfuge? Perfidious science?
Just another variation on the “Warm = warming” theme.
That’s what, like the 10th way they have come up with to say the same thing? They probably have an office contest to come up with creative ways to rephrase that particular lie. It’s all they can do, given that it is not warming …
This is just follows the normal pattern for ‘climate science’ start with the desired result make the data fit it, no mater what you have to do with it, then claim victory while smearing anyone that challenges you.
This is not science, and those that wish to counter this need to realise they cannot do so effectively using scientific arguments. You spend all day pointing out the error in the numbers , but the ‘value’ of message is not there in the first place .
We should also note 2012 was a high AMO year.
Global temps follow the formula of 0.5 times the AMO index by month.
The AMO peaked at about 0.486C in September so you do the math how the summer and early fall was impacted by both a small El Niño and the AMO at about as high as it gets.
The NOAA and Foster/Tamino, Skeptical Science don’t like to talk about the AMO (because it explains the 60 year temperature cycle TOO well).
Even based on the first 3 months rule 2012 is not a La Nina year because the -0.5 threshold is not reached in March. (-.41)
2012 -1.046 -.702 -.41 .059 .706 .903 1.139 .579 .271 .103 .166
Only 2 months are negative out of the entire year that represents a La Nina (-0.5 or less). Yet 5 months above 0.5 that represent El Nino occur during the same year. 2012 is the year that ENSO couldn’t decide what to do, with the last 4 months (including December) in La Nada threshold.
More months have reached the El Nino threshold than either La NIna or La Nada months so for. Therefore with only 2 months 2012 does not reach the required threshold at the beginning of the year to be claimed either an El Nino or La NIna. For that reason because there was no trend should be called a La Nada year.
2010 1.152 1.52 1.39 .863 .577 -.433 -1.166 -1.822 -2.03 -1.946 -1.602 -1.58
The first 3 months for 2010 are in the El Nino threshold (0.5+) and with the lag with global temperatures creates a peak that represents a typical global temperature spike associated with El Nino. That is why the first 3 months scientifically support whether one year peaks or troughs. For 2012 though only 2 months were reached this threshold so it shouldn’t be called a El Nino or La Nina year. The sudden change from positive to negative MEI values or negative to positive is what creates the peak or troughs during that year.
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/wti/from:2009/to:2011
Added to my above post, the 5 months of above 0.5+ MEI values between April and August caused this to happen (shown below) to global temperatures.
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/wti/from:2012
Anyone doubting the importance of this threshold of 0.5 or -0.5 reached for the first 3 months, only need to look at 1997.
1997 -.487 -.607 -.253 .493 1.119 2.307 2.756 3.001 3 2.358 2.518 2.32
How many would call 1997 a La NIna year based on the first 3 negative months?
The whole idea of ranking years is something they do just to hide the fact that temperatures have been flat for many years now. They’re conveniently hiding the inconvenient fact that “global warmth” is not at all the same as “global warming”.
Btw. Nino 3.4 temperatures have gone a long way down from the almost-El-Niño earlier this year, I wonder if it could still turn into a La Niña by January? Would that be unprecedented in modern times?